I personally, wonder whether anyone in this thread actually plays this game for fun or if they just care about roleplaying.

For some of us those two things are identical.

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No disrespect, but personally I find making people happy and solving world hunger more important than pretending to be an elf with other adults.

No disagreement there, which is why I choose my day job and many other aspects of my life accordingly. However keeping myself sane and reasonably happy is a large part of staying optimally able to be productive and positive in those other spheres, and for me roleplaying is a major cheering element in my life.

Playing a bunch of different perspectives, with different moralities, and - perhaps most important to this particular discussion - different degrees of capacity and agency within the RPG universe (referring to that as "viability" seems an over-simplification) and interacting with other people doing the same, is an ongoing contribution to broadening my understanding of and ability to empathise with a broader range of people in the real world. So yeah, I will defend my roleplaying as positive in intent to the broader world, and encourage others towards it on similar grounds. (And that is specifically "encourage", not demand or dictate or anything like that save within the context of negotiating the particular social contract of a game I am personally involved with.)

The maths involved in Pathfinder, on the other hand, is arithmetic and probability on a scale I was reasonably competent in thirty years ago in school and only occasionally have use for since, so there is only so much benefit polishing those skills by min-maxing is to me, even if I did find it fun.

Please, please, please can we have numerical dimensions on more creatures ? Weight not so much, but when size categories cover roughly a doubling in length/height and an eight-fold range of weight, specifics would really help, particularly for entries that did not have them. (I'm looking at the B5 entry for polar bears, where neither the regular nor the dire polar bears have lengths or heights and they're listed as the same size category. Though I suspect the most useful one for me to have long term would be dimensions for dragons at different age categories.)

Its easy to play an ineffective combat character. Spread your stats so your highest score is a 14 (or put your highest score in charisma on a non-Sorcerer/bard. The game does support your style of play.

I don't like point-buys generally fwiw, I far prefer the range of characters you get from 2d6+6, or 4d6 and drop the worst.

That isn't fair. Wanting your character to be viable isn't 'wanting to power build'.

A lot of complaints are "I want to do this, but it makes me an actively worse character." which means that they want to make a character based on a concept, but they can't because it would be ineffective as part of the party.

And if that's what all of you want, the trick is to play a different style of game where "effective" doesn't depend so much on combat.

Combat is such an important part of the game. Look at any Paizo AP, even the roleplay heavy ones easily have combat take up a third of the time.

And are in general well-equipped with suggestions of possible alternative ways to handle any individual encounter.

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You know what isn’t fun? Not contributing to the success of the game for a third of the time. Remember fighters from PF1e? How they had nothing to contribute outside of combat? That was the number 1 complaint about the class. Why is it ok to complain about that, but not okay to complain about having the same problem in combat?

I had kind of hoped that the bit of my post I have bolded would count as an answer to that. I was offering a suggestion for an approach to deal with the specific issue of combat-ineffectiveness getting in the way of making the characters people are interested in playing. I have no objection at all to people who want to play games almost entirely focused on combat to ameliorate the lack of utility of fighters in other contexts; the later parts of the Giantslayer AP suggest to me that neither do Paizo.

If I'm arguing for anything, it's support for playing the game you want to play.

I crunched the numbers to check whether starting with a 16 in your primary stat was viable. That’s right. I did a dirty thing and crunched numbers on a non-optimal choice. In fact, I’ve largely been doing that. Why? Because I want to see what the tolerance is for not min/maxing.

So before you pat yourself on the back as a superior role player, you might want to look at the context in which numbers are getting crunched.

I am not arguing for myself as a superior role-player, and am sorry if I came across as making such a claim.

I am arguing that for me, and for a non-trivial number of people I have played with, the range of characters we are interested in includes ones that don't meet the standards for "viability" being held up in this thread. In my case, this goes back to the days of BECMI; first-level wizards who could easily not survive a fight with an angry housecat and so on.

Anyone whose character is more effective than yours is a fun stealing munchkin optimizer who can't role-play and you should exclude them from your game for lowering the tone.

Anyone whose character is less effective than yours is endangering the rest of the party by not pulling their weight and you should dump the newb loser.

It takes a few uncomfortable conversations to go through with all that and you may take some social splash damage, but it will eventually lead to the nirvana of a perfect game. Or more likely finding yourself googling "how to play TTRPGs solo?"

I mean... There is a minimum line that any build has to cross before it's "viable". And being viable is not just about "winning", but about "fun". It's not fun to suck, to get owned by monsters, to miss more than half the time, that your spells never work.

Your notion of what's fun to roleplay seems to exclude a fair amount of things mine do not, and I appreciate the game supporting both parts of that range.

That isn't fair. Wanting your character to be viable isn't 'wanting to power build'.

A lot of complaints are "I want to do this, but it makes me an actively worse character." which means that they want to make a character based on a concept, but they can't because it would be ineffective as part of the party.

And if that's what all of you want, the trick is to play a different style of game where "effective" doesn't depend so much on combat.

Sarusan in particular strikes me as a blank canvas considering the whole "undiscovered mysterious land" shtick of its, though much like everything else I hope we avoid a colonialist outsider perspective of it.

Plus you don't exactly see "Aboriginal Australian fantasy" very often.

I'd really like to see Casmaron, but I kind of like having Sarusan as a blank for the moment. And if it's going to be not blank, I'd rather it not be Aboriginal Australian fantasy, because my understanding is that what we know of Aboriginal Australian myths represents the stories of one surviving cultural group where many more were lost entirely, and also many of those stories are specifically tied to being told in certain locations or contexts which make it essentially impossible to adapt them into an RPG context without being disrespectful. If Sarusan is to be detailed at some point, I'd favour it being original content not based on any real-world culture.

I can't deny that the art for the hobgoblins is among my least favorite ones, especially since their illustrations in the Monster Codex and the Ironfang Invasion AP. I have nothing against their new head shape or their elongated arms - they are actually more fearsome in this way - but they do feel as smaller than they have always been.

I still don't like gangly hobgoblins, because if they're going to be the organised legions rather than the barbarian hordes, the more solid squat look of the PF1 hobgoblin is a lot more convincing to me as holding the line in a shieldwall.

Looking at the new information in the AP summary and background information in Hellknight Hlll, the thing that comes very strongly to mind is; will there be support for running this chapter for PCs who find Mengkare's position sympathetic?

I feel like as long as you let the players now at character creation that this i a different ap where theres no real happy ending i think itll work,

The players I am hoping to get to run this with at some point will, as per my usual practice, be given absolutely minimal information, and I firmly expect them to have figured out most likely ending of chapter 6 from somewhere in the first half of chapter 1, to be on tenterhooks about it all the way through, and to really appreciate how the ending works. Because needing their characters to survive in order to count thwarting the Big Bad as a win is neither something we need to have fun, nor really compatible with how we tend to envision Good. So while I expect I am in a minority, I wanted to register appreciation for an AP that ends that way, and interest in there being more APs where the "good ending" win condition is this far from unambiguous victory in all respects.

Description text before statblock is going to take me a while to get used to, as is some of the new art.

More descriptive text for the dragons is great; I hope that continues into any further sets of dragons in subsequent bestiaries. I still wish more monsters came with specific physical dimensions, though.

I also live somewhere where temperatures way below -11 C are fairly commonplace, and I'm willing to bet that the table only seems goofy when it's presented out of context like this.

I've lived in Montreal for some time, so came to a temperature range of +40 to -40 C from growing up in a climate of much milder variation, and the oddest thing to me about this set of temperature bands is that they don't all feel a good match with where how cold it is feels like a qualitative change; I would have thought that the -17C or so "this is where the inside of your nose freezes" level would be an intuitive distinction for adventurers without thermometers, for example.

I don't think there's definitive rules about this, but they seem to range as far as power is concerned. For example, Dusk Ronin is a child of two full deities, but I don't think that she's anything other than a standard star archon (CR 19), Ragathiel (CR 26 demigod) is the son of Dispater (CR 27 demigod) and Feronia (CR ? demigoddess), so roughly the same power, but Shelyn (full deity) is the daughter of Thron (not any sort of deity at all (so presumably less than CR 25, possibly less than CR 20) and some other unknown creature. That's as many examples as I can think of off the top of my head.

Wasn't Thron originally a full deity before Zon-Kuthon beat him up and bound him as his herald ?

Agreed. I personally would like to see NO trap options intentionally in the system, but I think once a game gets enough options you'll get them unintentionally.

Which strikes me as a consequence of higher-level design decisions about where to put the complexity.

A set of well-defined character classes, each of which has flavourful and thematically apt abilities (be they archetypes or feats or however you want to represent unique distinguishing abilities), is a reasonably finite set of things to test, and if you add another class, you are adding one class and one class progression's set of additional things to test. (Leaving out multi-classing, which is an abomination.)

Implementing that complexity in abilities that can be mixed and matched, otoh, gives you a number of combinations that is multiplied by the total number of abilities every time you add a new one, which fairly rapidly becomes something where it's impossible to playtest every possible combination for traps or game-breakers within the lifespan of the universe, let alone a plausible release cycle.

My feeling is that PF1 tends far more toward the second option than I would like, and I fear that PF2 has pulled back from it enough.

(And yeah, that does cut back on flexibility some. But as I think I have said before, give me forty solid iconics and I'll be happy with a game where those are the only characters I can play.)

Honestly alot of the complaints from sherlock are things that needed to be fixed from 1e, Rampant magic strength, constraining battle mechanics and a need for a maths doctorate to play the game at high levels.

I wish people would stop using that sort of shorthand for finding high-level play complex; the arithmetic may be long and fiddly, but it's arithmetic, not calculus or anything more abstruse than that. When the group I currently GM for get together, the average number of maths/sciency doctorates per person is about 1.5; and while I am well aware that makes us statistical outliers (y'know, because of having a grounding in statistics), I still appreciate the game being fun for that set of people as well as for newcomers.

Likewise; I fear it's going to have much more restatting PF1e monsters, and much less new content, than I would ideally wish for, because given even a moderately robust conversion system, I'd want maybe a dozen examples at most and apart from that the only existing monsters I'd value entries for are ones that were very low on flavour text in the PF1e bestiaries, like dragons.

It seems to me that "reward system mastery" and "avoid trap options" should not be mutually exclusive goals. A system with a baseline of everyone's character being competent and capable enough to succeed at whatever challenges the game offers them, but with options opening to be better than that, might be difficult but I don't believe it is entirely impossible.

My personal preference would be for design around a greater increase in complexity as the level goes up, rather than complexity in the initial build. In other words, give new players a chance to get a handle on that scale of complexity as the game progresses (it will always be a sight easier to implement E6 for those that favour a simpler game than to build working house-rules for high-end complexity). It does not feel to me like PF2.0 is going in the directions I would favour for this, but I am willing to wait and see.

Do you use your computer via command line like you had to with early computers? No because someone thought "Maybe users have an easier time if the interface was graphical" and not "I had to use command line so new users should also struggle with it".

It may be worth noting that there are a non-trivial number of people for whom graphical interfaces are awkward and non-intuitive and who work and think much better in text.

I generally don't like playing "sidekicks" to heroes anymore, and I think it's also harder for the GM to design encounters that challenge everyone but don't end up killing the "less capable" PCs. Naturally you want and need your PCs to cooperate in most campaigns, but it's tough when there is disparity in their abilities. For example, in that Undermountain campaign I mentioned before my elven magic-user/thief had AC 5 and the "elven hero" fighter had AC -4. That campaign ended when my PC and another roguish elf died in combat, but the "hero" survived, I think? And my first new 3.0 PC was an elf ranger with Str 12, Dex 15 and Con 13... and the "alpha" PC in our group had 14 in his *lowest* stat. That campaign wasn't really fun either, and I think it ended at level 3 or something?

That sounds a lot more combat-focused than the games I tend to run, which I can quite see making a difference; if your focus is social intrigue, I see no reason for those two characters not to be equally capable. Then again, if a magic-user/thief with AC like that is in frontline combat at all, it would seem to me that something's gone off the rails on a tactical level.

I love playing competent logistical support. One of my life goals is to take a character from 1 to 20 without ever doing a single point of damage directly.

I'd like the world, at most, to be 50% human-dominated, not the current setup, which seems more like 90+% dominated (with the first Inner Sea maps not even having a visible non-human nation depicted, and only later ones having Kyonin and the Five Kingdoms sort of thrown on, even if neither seems to be a 'nation' in the sense of somewhere like Cheliax or Taldor or Qadira).

Maybe forming nations and caring about borders and lines on maps is a specifically human oddity that all the other sentient races of Golarion look at funny and go along with only a bit and reluctantly.

I'm sure I remember something to the effect that dragons, for example, see the world as divided up into their individual territories and generally could not care less about how the talking monkeys organise.

The Material Plane (composed mostly of the vacuum of space) is wrapped in a giant bubble of air. The Plane of Air is the sky for the Plane of Water. At the bottom of the Plane of Water's endless sea is the Plane of Earth. The deeper you go into the Plane of Earth, the warmer it gets until you eventually arrive at the Plane of Fire, which acts as a gigantic sun for all the outer planes.

I dislike this, compared to earlier D&D cosmologies, on a practical level because you can only kind of squeeze the equivalent of three of the paraelemental planes in there and there's no room for the quasi-elemental planes at all. (I also miss the outer planes from the Great Wheel that did not make it into Paizo's cosmology.)

I dislike it on an aesthetic level because it reduces most planar travel to essentially extremely long-distance teleporting. I far prefer thinking of Shadow and Faerie as adjacent to the Material Plane on opposite sides in one extra spatial dimension beyond the Material's three, the Ether adjacent in a second which leads to the Elemental planes, and Astral and the Outer Planes in a third.

Rahadoum could work in a setting where religion and Gods are left up to faith, but in Golarion it sticks out like a sore thumb, and one that would be better off amputated at that.

I have a strong desire to run a campaign in which Rahadoum turns out to have been intentionally helped along by agreement between the gods in order to create a location where, for example, outsider representatives of LG and LE deities could meet to negotiate a temporary alliance against some specific CE threat, without having to worry about that upsetting or demoralising any of the faithful of the LG deity in question.

Yeah, there's always going to be that with made-up fantasy names. It either sounds great in your head, and then some chucklehead mispronounces it once at the table and it's a running joke for the rest of the campaign.

One minor irritation I have, though it makes sense in terms of what Paizo can plausibly afford, is that their fantasy names appear to go through a rather limited localisation check. If I were still living in Ireland, running a game with characters whose name ends in "fek" or a major ethnicity whose name ends in "s+*+e" would be a non-starter because of those being local pronunciations of common obscenities.

It is interesting how flexible the 'eurocentric' concept is, in that several game settings (not just Golarion) have fantasy equivalents to Egypt (Hamunaptra, Osirion, Mulhurand), Persia, Japan, China, even India, but while very few have a 'fantasy Ireland' or 'fantasy Spain' or 'fantasy Germany'

As a person who is actually from Ireland, lack of a fantasy Ireland in Golarion is something I am relieved by, because the overwhelming majority of fantasy Irelands are excruciatingly bad.

The Harbingers of Fate are effectively committing the sunk cost and gambler's fallacies.

One minor thing I dislike is not getting a lot more on the Harbingers of Fate, and what they were expecting to happen and trying to bring about. I would have loved a Harbingers of Fate AP but that seems less likely with every passing year.

I'm one of "those people". The grim fate of all souls, whether good or evil, is a very repulsive feature of the setting.

An afterlife that works like a physical process, at that level, rather than being solely morality-based is a major plus for me in terms of suspension of disbelief. The fundamental underlying principles of the universe being something like entropy rather than something like justice is a scale I find works better.

I definitely do not want to return to days of rolling ability scores, that often resulted in bitterness when one of the guys rolled up an "elven hero" and the rest were playing farmboys with pitchforks.

My players would likely rise in revolt if there is not an option for getting exactly that result, because making characters of that sort of different level of capacity work well together is a large part of the fun for us.

I actually think PF2 will be very easy to take PF2 to above 20th level. Your proficiency just continues to increase by 1 every level above 20th, and you just keep picking feats as you did before. 20th level class feats seem really strong and you can keep getting more of them, unlike PF1 capstones. You could run out of feats eventually, but we know there's gonna be plenty more feats coming down the pipeline.

That certainly seems like good grounds to build on, but in and of itself does not guarantee the kind of dramatic qualitative shifts I would favour for level extension. Not unless some of these feats do specifically paradigm-shifting things, on a par with the way first getting flight or teleportation shifts the possibilities for a party.

I recall an encounter in the Age of Worms where the main opponent had a number of Liches as minions and that our party effectively dealt with the Liches in a round or two before focusing on the boss du jour.

What I mostly look for in a level-progression-based RPG is the feel of the scope of possibilities changing dramatically over time, and both being terrified of hobgoblins at level 1 and being able to treat liches as bugs on your windshield by the last quarter or so of the level progression feel important to that. I am still hoping that with time we will see PF2 make something akin to epic work - preferably not a mythic-equivalent, I specifically want something after the end of rather than parallel to the standard level progression. (I still miss the I part of BECMI, which was my first introduction to level-based gaming.)

It also seems to me that it will always be easier to play E6 (or E10 or E15 or whatever fits your preferences) within a game that extends to higher levels, than to bolt home-made attempts at epic onto a game that is designed with a lower cap on powers and abilities.

A class I have been thinking about recently that would be fun to port over is the 3/3.5 Jester, a master of improvised weapons, the man who always wins the bar fight (that isn't the monk). Someone who can play out the "Faceless Knight" Lancelot stories where he bludgeoned a man in full plate with a chair leg. I want a guy who can walk into Copper Tree, pick up LITERALLY ANYTHING, and then go and fend off a horde of goblins with it, maybe even a hobgoblin or 5.

I'm hoping there won't be a lot of class bloat. Especially classes with incredibly narrow focuses. Some of these being suggested seem way too narrow to me to justify a base class. I want classes to be broad concepts that fit a lot of different, smaller concepts inside of them. Archetypes do a good job for more niche roles.

If they're distinct enough to be archetypes, to my mind they are distinct enough to be separate classes.

That’s a good angle. Or maybe even the mythic heroes *needed* to be on the abyssal side to close the Worldwound, and sacrificed themselves to do so. That would also explain their absence in a suitably heroic way.

If ever there was an AP that worked as a Bolivian Army Ending WotR was it.

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(I’m sure they’ll leave the details open, though, to ensure no one’s run through WotR conflicts with canon.)

I was kind of hoping for some canonical outcome for Alderpash, though if that were going to turn up at all Return of the Runelords would have been the place for it.

...all of which I support! But if you're looking to make room for all of that additional content, may I suggest removing content that doesn't directly support the story? Many of the hex encounters and Wanted Posters quests were just XP fillers that can be removed now that the AP has so much more quality content that can be added. Things like the trapdoor spider from book 1 and the roc-eggs-for-a-chef sidequest were unmemorable and could be replaced with the quality fan-content that has been suggested in the years since.

Please don't do this. The sandboxy sidequests that do not tie on to the main plot are among the things that make Kingmaker Kingmaker in a good way.

All of Paizo's APs have a solid main story. Not so many of them are focused as much as Kingmaker on that shape of giving you a slice of world.

For those of you who Mind Theater your games, you don't need any of the NPC illustrations -- just their descriptions. Therefore, if you're buying the material with the art -- you are probably paying too much according to what at least 3 other people pointed out.

Everyone I know is doing tabletop, and we have to have it in one form or another to have a good game.

This is kind of excluding the middle ground of those of us who play with visuals for the tactical layout only, for which a small whiteboard, some pawns and spare dice suffice. (One of the things I like about not being an undergrad any more is not playing in contexts where bottlecaps were the primary representations, so there was a direct linear relation between how late in a session it was and how many entities you could represent via how much people had had to drink.)

Great book, with some very lovely stuff in. The cosmological information gives me vague thoughts about how to do a well-beyond-Epic campaign in the PF multiverse, though it would likely not remain the recognisable PF multiverse for long; the mention of twamni felt reminiscent of the scale at which Nobilis works.

Was it just me, or did it seem implied that the ultimate truth Tabris realised and then lost is

I have always wanted to run a planar game where both the proteans and the slaad keep appearing. But never at the same time. And never acknowledging the existence of each other. So when, for example, the players ask the proteans about the slaad, the answer can be condensed to just "I don't know what you are talking about. You are delusional/funny. We are the embodiment/caretakers of chaos/Maelstorm." Then the protean leaves, they open the next door, and it's frog surprise time again.

Bonus points if every time the slaad show up they sing "The Michigan Rag".

Multiple different contradictory interpretations/translations of ancient prophecies are fun to play with, particularly when the PCs follow the wrong one and make things worse and then have to find a way to fix it.

Does it outright say anywhere Karzoug created them? I always assumed so, along with the inverted giants (giants turned INSIDE-OUT yet still alive) and runeslave giants. He seems to have a thing for giants and he's an evil transmuter so making horrible mutant monsters seems par for the course.

IIRC WotR talks about Alderpash creating the inverted giants as a response to the existence of the rune giants, which would have been a good bit before Karzoug's time.

To my knowledge, there are no official crossbreeds between different PC Races in PF1 except for Half Elf and Half Orc.

There are Dhampirs, which are part vampire, Half-Dragons as you mention, and also various Races and Templates showing descent from Outsiders of various sorts, Ogrekin (ie: Half Ogres...it's a template so Ogres can explcitly breed with any Medium Humanoid) but not much else in terms of crossbreeds where one half is not human (and even all of the above are most often part human).

I have a feeling I read something somewhere to the effect that, except for the combinations given specific Bestiary entries, any combination of humanoids will give a Mongrelman, but I can't find a reference for it now.